Main Street Museum: A collection of curiosities

May 1, 2011

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The first thing that might throw you off about the Main Street Museum is that, despite its name, it's on Bridge Street. That's just a little oxymoronic appetizer for what you'll find inside.

Stuffed animal heads stare at you as soon as you walk in, but somehow they're not as stern as those you'd see at a hunting lodge (you'll swear they're winking at you). Lower your eyes from the taxidermy and you'll see shelves full of what seem to be random oddities — toy turtles, Native American dolls, religious kitsch — all seemingly gathered without a hint of rhyme or reason.

By the time you're done touring the museum's collection of collections, you might feel like you've just ogled an Andy Warhol exhibit, something that's making a commentary or two on the state of popular culture. The museum founded by David Ford has played a major role in shaping White River Junction's popular culture, according to Gabriel Q, who's helping to shape that culture with his puppetry studio in the Tip Top Media and Arts Building: He credits the arrival of Northern Stage and the Main Street Museum in the 1990s with pioneering the town's artistic growth, something the museum continues to develop by increasing its offerings of live music and art events.

The philosophy of the Main Street Museum is a tough one to explain. Perhaps that's best left to the museum's online Wiki page:

"The Main Street Museum is a small, public collection of curiosities and artifacts, each one is significant and each one tells some kind of story about human beings and the complex, sometimes baffling universe we are a part of. The aim of the Museum is the study of an accumulation of small details, cultivating among both specialists, and among the general public, a sense of wonder at the big questions that arise when we study and categorize objects and our reactions to them. We believe that our relationships with objects are more complex than usually acknowledged; indeed sometimes far more complex."